The description of America given by her sad and angry friend resembles one of those relentless portraits which are made by rustic photographers. The unmitigated sunlight does its worst through an unadjusted lens; and the result is a picture which is fearfully and wonderfully made. "It looks like her," you say, "it looks horribly like her. But thank God I never saw her look just like that." No one can deny that the life of America has developed more rapidly and more fully on the industrial side than on any other. No one can deny that the larger part, if not the better part, of her energy and effort has gone into the physical conquest of nature and the transformation of natural resources into material wealth. No one can deny that this undue absorption in one side of life has resulted in a certain meagreness and thinness on other sides. No one can deny that the immense prosperity of America, and her extraordinary success in agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and finance have produced a swollen sense of importance, which makes the country peddler feel as if he deserved some credit for the $450,000,000 balance of foreign trade in favour of the United States in 1907, and the barber's apprentice congratulate himself that American wealth is reckoned at $116,000,000,000, nearly twice that of the next richest country in the world. This feeling is one that has its roots in human nature. The very cabin-boy on a monstrous ocean steamship is proud of its tonnage and speed. But that this spirit is not universal nor exclusive, that there are some Americans who are not satisfied--who are even rather bitterly dissatisfied--with $116,000,000,000 as a statement of national achievement, the book from which I have quoted may be taken as a proof. There are still better proofs to be found, I think, in the earnestly warning voices which come from press and pulpit against the dangers of commercialism, and in the hundreds of thousands of noble lives which are freely consecrated to ideals in religion, in philanthropy, in the service of man's intellectual and moral needs. These services are ill-paid in America, as indeed they are everywhere, but there is no lack of men and women who are ready and glad to undertake them.